Tremendous changes have been occurring in the Internet that influence our everyday lives. For example, online social networks have become the new meeting grounds. The development of such online social networks touch countless aspects of our everyday lives, providing instant access to people of similar mindsets, and enabling us to form partnerships with more people in more ways than ever before.
Generally a social network is a social structure, made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes. Social relationships can be viewed in terms of nodes and ties, where nodes represent individual actors in social networks, and ties represent relationships between such actors, so that in its simplest form, a social network is a map of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied.
Also, a social network service uses software to build online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Social network services can be network-based such as the Internet-based and can enable users to communicate or interact in different ways. For example, users of a social network could interact via messaging, email, discussion groups, chat rooms, file-sharing, blogging, developing and maintaining lists of contacts, and so forth.
One of the more useful features of the Internet and associated forms of communication such as e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms and forums is access to information that is useful in everyday work and social lives. However, social networks often operate in separate silos and do not share information. Accordingly, potentially beneficial social connections and corresponding information flows between users or members of different social networks go unrealized, and users who are members of multiple social networks may find it difficult to use or benefit from all features of those social networks to which they belong. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.